Awareness

I'm attempting to get myself to journal every day again... I'm hoping that it will work this time because it's for school! Actually, I will be making two short journal entries every day: one on my morning practice to cultivate a level of observation of myself and one in the afternoon/evening (after I get home from work) on the role that sutras 1.1 to 1.4 play during my daily life. Here goes!

This morning I decided to practice a samana sequence that I came up with last night for my teens' class. The intention of this sequence is to introduce the idea of integrating the breath with the movement. To start off, I can say that I feel very balanced right now, although I'm certainly missing that nice rush I have after doing my normal brhmana practice every morning. Suffice to say, this was not the exactly right practice for me as an individual for this time of day. One of the things I really noticed was my chest tightness for lack of a backbend or two to open it after sleeping all night. Of course, I designed the practice to be done by a bunch of teenagers after they get out of school. As far as the breath integration with movement, I did not inspire myself the way Robin might in this practice, so I feel like I'm missing something. Perhaps I will do this practice again tomorrow morning while holding the intention to really work myself with the breath (because I tend to be a little lax in that area!).

As far as the sequence itself, I liked it. It was very simple but allowed for the untrained mind to focus on the breath without getting distracted by the body so much. Now that I'm looking at the sequence again, I realize that I forgot to do uttanasana before extending into side angle pose. No wonder my back hurt in trikonasana! I guess that's a good example of why forward bends are the hub of the wheel... I went right into laterals instead of preparing my spine first. Good to know! Other than that piece of it, I think the only change I would make is to have the student stay in each of the poses and feel after doing the repetitions. I tried it in trikonasana and felt that it gave me a chance to integrate what my body was feeling in the pose (like a svasana of sorts).

Now that I've been sitting for a little while, I think I'm going to incorporate a backbend into the sequence to get the upper back working a little bit in that fashion. Maybe all I need to do is have them extend back a little further during the upwards motion in uttansana (except for the very last one so we can move into laterals safely). I think that would assist in the breathwork and release some of that tension there from sitting all day in school. OK, I think I covered all I wanted to cover for this morning.